"Good," he said. "It's all I have."
Kayla Breck came the next day.
She stood on my porch with Mabel on her hip, and Mabel saw that Rook's bed by the fireplace was empty and said, "Where doggy?" and Kayla's face crumpled a little.
"I saw the post," she said. "Candace's. The one where she says Rook lunged at her." She shifted Mabel to her other hip. "Wyatt has a camera on our garage. He put it in last year after somebody stole a bike. It's pointed down the street. He was going through it last night because, honestly, because he wanted to see the dog lunge, he wanted to send it to the county." She held out her phone. "This is from Sunday. Six-fifty."
It was from a distance and at an angle, but it was clear, and it was daylight. It showed Rook and me on the sidewalk across the street from Candace's house. It showed Candace coming down her driveway fast with her phone up. It showed Rook stop and stand and bark once, and look up at me, and it showed my hand stay loose on the leash, and Rook stay exactly where he was.
And it showed something else, which Kayla scrubbed back to show me. At 5:07 that morning, an hour and forty-three minutes before Candace "discovered" the deposit on her walk, a figure in a long, hooded rain shell came out of Candace Vreeland's front door, walked down her front steps, bent over at the bottom for about four seconds, and walked back inside.
"I'm so sorry," Kayla said. She was crying now, a little, the way you cry when you're also angry. "Mabel had her hands in it. And I was so sure. She told me she saw you. Not your dog. She said she saw you, walking Rook past our house that morning, early. She said she didn't want to say it in public because she didn't want to embarrass you."
I sent the clip to Paloma Ferro. Paloma sent it to the county attorney's office, which handled the hearing on the county's side, with a cc to Officer Ybarra. And the next afternoon a revised exhibit list for the hearing went out by email to all parties, the way they do, including the complainant.
Most of the list was what you'd expect. The HOA's photographs. The violation letters. My vet records. The Breck garage recording, now marked Exhibit 14.
And Exhibit 15, at the bottom, one line. Laboratory submission: species identification analysis, Samples 1–3, Tamsen County Animal Services Case No. 24-0917. Submitted to State University Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory, Molecular Diagnostics Section. Results pending.